Writing Workshops

IS THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR YOU?

If you have a poem you'd like to write/edit for submission to The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize in 2027 this is the workshop for you. (Get started early, get a revision system in place.)

If you want to learn how to structure, stretch and deepen a long poem, this workshop is definitely for you.

If you want to turn a long poem into a chapbook to send to chapbook publishers, this is the workshop to make that happen.

If you've NEVER WRITTEN a long poem, this workshop is also for you!

Leading up to each class, we'll read award-winning long poems as structural and technical examples. We'll dive into generative writing, uncover ways to deepen the work, identify possible gaps and "write into" said gaps, and explore ways of stretching your poem. We'll look at narrative and non-narrative, linear and non-linear methods of writing a long poem, and more!

A long poem is traditionally 10+ pages in length (in the modern tradition). It can be lineated or in prose format, it can be in sections, or one rambling poem of many stanzas. There are no rules per se, but there are plenty of ways to tame this long and unwieldy form.

FULL 4-WEEK COURSE (3 hours per class):
$250 including all the readings
Please inquire about a payment plan :)

MY LONG POEM JOURNEY:

I fell in love with the modern long poem after reading Aurian Haller's winning poem in The Malahat Review. But I'd already been seduced by Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and had tackled Beowulf and Gilgamesh.

Did you know that the CBC Poetry Awards used to be a Long Poem Prize? It switched to it's present 600 word length back in 2012. I wrote my first long poem in a workshop with Tim Lilburn (who read Dante's Paradise Lost at the beginning of several classes), and my long poem from that workshop ended up on the CBC longlist in 2009.

Before being invited to join the editorial board of The Malahat Review, I was shortlisted for all three of their poetry contests, including the Long Poem Prize. As a poetry editor, I shortlisted the contest reading massive piles of long poems.

My chapbook, Disassembling A Dancer, began as a long prose poem, and most of it was published in Grain Magazine (the award-winning chapbook is basically a long poem that's been subtitled).

Cult Life contains two long poems that I eventually split and distributed throughout the book. And I have other long poems in forthcoming manuscripts. I can't stop writing long poems!

Zoe Dickinson

“I want to say again how grateful I am for this magical feeling of suddenly knowing what I'm doing with this poem! It's really amazing to feel this way and just what I needed to carry me forward on what is shaping up to be a long project. You have such a gift for helping people find their way.”